Grammar and Eschatology
Thus, by inner necessity, the search for God demands a culture of the word or – as Jean Leclercq put it: eschatology and grammar are intimately connected with one another in Western monasticism (cf. L’amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu). The longing for God, the désir de Dieu, includes amour des lettres, love of the word, exploration of all its dimensions. Because in the biblical word God comes towards us and we towards him, we must learn to penetrate the secret of language, to understand it in its construction and in the manner of its expression.
A word denotes action or being or something to do with one of those things.
A sentence is a judgment (or I suppose, a question, but let's just focus on declarative sentences). You are saying something about something.
A sentence, to be a sentence, has to link being with action or at least with existence or definition.
A group of sentences -- a paragraph or longer -- are an argument. I suppose this term would be stretched if you are writing or speaking fiction, or poetry, but not beyond the bounds of reason. You are still more or less proposing something. In fiction, the metric is a kind of plausibility within itself, and usually it's somewhat dependent on the outside world too -- what people understand about reality.
What I am trying to say, in saying that a group of sentences forms an argument, is that it asserts by its very structure that it is making a meaningful comment on reality.
Also by its very structure, it is positing coherence of some sort.
In modern times, there has been increasing focus on what the word, sentence, or argument does not say, or says indirectly. But note that this only puts a new argument in some sort of conjunction with the previous one. It could affirm and complete the truth in the original, but it can also try to negate or subvert it.
A word denotes action or being or something to do with one of those things.
A sentence is a judgment (or I suppose, a question, but let's just focus on declarative sentences). You are saying something about something.
A sentence, to be a sentence, has to link being with action or at least with existence or definition.
A group of sentences -- a paragraph or longer -- are an argument. I suppose this term would be stretched if you are writing or speaking fiction, or poetry, but not beyond the bounds of reason. You are still more or less proposing something. In fiction, the metric is a kind of plausibility within itself, and usually it's somewhat dependent on the outside world too -- what people understand about reality.
What I am trying to say, in saying that a group of sentences forms an argument, is that it asserts by its very structure that it is making a meaningful comment on reality. This holds even if you are proposing that reality does not exist, or that you cannot know it. By your very grammar you are refuting your proposition. I don't see a way out of that.
By its very structure, a statement is positing coherence of some sort. It is affirming or denying something outside of itself that can be affirmed or denied.
First and foremost, it must be frankly admitted straight away that it was not their intention to create a culture nor even to preserve a culture from the past. Their motivation was much more basic. Their goal was: quaerere Deum. Amid the confusion of the times, in which nothing seemed permanent, they wanted to do the essential – to make an effort to find what was perennially valid and lasting, life itself. They were searching for God. They wanted to go from the inessential to the essential, to the only truly important and reliable thing there is.
It is sometimes said that they were “eschatologically” oriented. But this is not to be understood in a temporal sense, as if they were looking ahead to the end of the world or to their own death, but in an existential sense: they were seeking the definitive behind the provisional.
Eschatological orientation includes an existential, here and now sense. We seek Him here, in the "grammar" of Scripture, in creation, in our life circumstances. We did not originate these things. We can only reflect them.
Quaerere Deum: because they were Christians, this was not an expedition into a trackless wilderness, a search leading them into total darkness. God himself had provided signposts, indeed he had marked out a path which was theirs to find and to follow. This path was his word, which had been disclosed to men in the books of the sacred Scriptures.
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